Not 40 minutes had been played in the Serie A curtain-raiser between Juventus and Cagliari when VAR was called into use for the first time.
Photograph: Alessandro Di Marco/EPA

It used to be that a new Serie A season would provide us with a fresh round of discorsi da bar – football talking points to get worked up about over a beer or Monday morning espresso. This year, things went in a different direction. When the final whistles had blown and Giorgia Cardinaletti welcomed us back to Rai 2’s long-running highlights show, Domenica Sportiva, she and her studio guests instead dived straight into discorsi da VAR.

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What is clear, already, is that it will have a major impact on the coming campaign. Not 40 minutes had been played in Saturday’s curtain-raiser between Juventus and Cagliari when the VAR was called into use for the first time: the referee, Fabio Maresca, pausing to review an Alex Sandro challenge on Duje Cop.

Play had initially been allowed to continue, with the ball going behind for a corner. Upon review, however, Maresca could see that Sandro had trod on Cop’s boot as the ball reached him inside the hosts’ penalty area. Cagliari were awarded a spot-kick, which they wasted – Diego Farias firing too close to Gigi Buffon, who plunged to his right and pushed away the shot.

Even so, a better advert for the new system was hard to imagine. A penalty against the champions, at their own ground? This was precisely the sort of incident that referees are accused of missing most often. Better yet, when Maresca eventually did point to the spot – having first jogged over to the touchline to review the incident on a TV monitor – Juventus’s players accepted his decision largely without complaint.

Similar successes would follow elsewhere as the weekend unfolded. Napoli’s opening goal at Verona, Fabio Quagliarella’s equaliser for Sampdoria against Benevento and a penalty award for Internazionale against Fiorentina were all reviewed, and on each occasion the referee’s initial decision was upheld justly. At the Stadio Ezio Scida, Crotone’s Federico Ceccherini had a yellow card upgraded to a straight red after his foul on Patrick Cutrone was reviewed.

One or two incidents were still missed. Fiorentina were left feeling aggrieved when they had a strong penalty shout of their own turned down on review after Miranda had appeared to clip Giovanni Simeone running into the area. The greatest officiating controversy of the weekend, however, arose specifically because one referee’s haste prevented the VAR from being deployed.

The system at Bologna’s Stadio Renato Dall’Ara had experienced technical glitches throughout their match against Torino but was up and running again by the 84th minute – when it could have been used to validate a match-winning goal for the Granata. The linesman had instinctively raised his flag when the ball pinged to Andrea Belotti in an offside position but replays showed that it came to him via the boot of an opponent: Mattia Destro.

All of which would have been fine, if the referee, Davide Massa, had waited for Alex Berenguer to stick the ball in the net before blowing his whistle. As it was, the match official stopped play a second too soon – meaning that the action could no longer be reviewed.

As Torino’s manager, Sinisa Mihajlovic, would lament afterwards: “It was a double mistake. The first was failing to spot that the pass to Belotti came from Destro – which we all saw on the pitch, together with the other 19,000 people watching except him. The second was the whistle because it has been said that [referees] should wait for the action to finish so that the VAR can intervene.”

Some degree of human error is inevitable. Overall, the VAR contributed to referees getting more decisions right on the opening weekend than they otherwise might. The lingering concern is whether the process remains too disruptive to the flow of the game. It took 97 seconds for Maresca to award Cagliari’s penalty against Juventus, during which both sets of players were left milling around, looking bemused.

The pause to review Miranda’s penalty-area challenge on Simeone at San Siro dragged on even longer and at present it feels as if not enough information is being given to fans. Unlike at a rugby game, for instance, where supporters can listen in on conversations between match referees and video assistants via the stadium PA, audiences at the weekend got nothing more than the match official miming a TV screen to explain the break in the play.

Overall, though, the reaction has been positive. The VAR can be used only to review four specific kinds of decisions – goals, penalty awards, red cards and cases of potential mistaken identity – so the number of delays should remain relatively low from game to game.

But of course, we have not really killed those discorsi da bar. Few big decisions in football are completely clearcut and one referee’s standard will not always match to another’s. Beyond Fiorentina and Torino’s grievances this weekend, there were also Cagliari fans asking why the VAR was not deployed to check whether Paulo Dybala had handled the ball in the buildup to Juventus’s second goal.

And, in truth, there was still plenty beyond the officiating to debate. With Milan and Inter matching Juventus’s 3-0 margin of victory and Napoli no less comfortable in their 3-1 victory at Verona, is it too soon to start asking which team looks best equipped to challenge the champions? Should Roma be more encouraged or concerned after Aleksandar Kolarov’s under-the-wall free-kick allowed them to steal a win away to Atalanta that they scarcely deserved?

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What was the Verona manager, Fabio Pecchia, thinking, meanwhile, when he chose to leave Giampaolo Pazzini out of his starting XI (the striker came off the bench to score his team’s goal against Napoli)? And which teenage talents should we be becoming most excited about after a weekend when the 19-year-old Cutrone scored his first senior goal – and set up another – for Milan, while the 15-year-old Eddy Salcedo made his debut for Genoa?

More than enough to get us through the Monday morning espresso. And for those who want more, fear not: Napoli are already back in action on Tuesday night.

Talking points

• There were 51,752 fans in attendance for Inter’s win at San Siro – the most they have had for an August match since 2009-10 – the year they won the treble. The sense of excitement around both Milanese clubs this year is palpable and can only be a good thing for Serie A as a whole. The Curva Nord had a special message for the Fiorentina manager, Stefano Pioli, on Sunday, too, dubbing him the “only true Interista” from their dismal 2016-17 campaign.

• Watching Borja Valero – a man who loves Florence so much that he had the map coordinates for Ponte Vecchio tattooed on his arm – pull the strings for Inter must have felt like a real kick in the teeth for fans of the Viola. Still, better to be kicked there than in the spot where he caught his replacement, Marco Benassi.

•Benevento threatened to make a dream start to life in Serie A, grabbing an early lead away to Sampdoria before succumbing to a pair of Fabio Quagliarella strikes. Instead, Spal were the only promoted team to take a point on the opening weekend – battling to a highly impressive goalless draw at Lazio.